We impeach President Yoon Seok-yeol in our name
Min Choi, MD
Activist and occupational and environmental medicine specialist
Translated by Michelle Jang
Korea Institute of Labor Safety and Health
One of the slogans that appeared at a rally calling for President Yoon Seok-yeol’s impeachment after declaration of martial law was, “The struggling workers were already in a state of martial law.” It is clear that we cannot simply treat the situation in which the president, the most powerful person in the country, declared martial law without the slightest legal basis as an ‘analogy’. However, this slogan shows that South Korea’s democracy was already in danger before martial law.
Can South Korea be a democratic society for workers who went on strike demanding structural reforms in shipbuilding subcontracting and wage increases that the government and companies had promised, only to be sued for hundreds of billions of won in damages? For teachers who made public the facts of sexual violence against their students and supported them, but were unfairly transferred and fired, this society and school are not different from a system that suppresses democratic actions by their subjects.
The voices of the workers who came out to fight for the impeachment of President Yoon are a desperate cry that the most basic foundations of democracy, which were already crumbling, cannot be allowed to be further damaged by an attempted coup d’état. It is an outcry containing the realization that martial law did not destroy democracy, but that the result of destroyed democracy led to martial law.
The crisis of capitalism that betrays even minimal workers’ health protection
According to Nancy Fraser,[1] legitimate and effective public power is a condition for capital accumulation. Therefore, capitalist societies always emphasize their ‘liberal democracy.’ However, capital’s infinite drive for accumulation destabilizes public power. The health of South Korean workers before martial law already shows that democracy in this society is not functioning properly.
This is illustrated by the attack on workers’ compensation that the Yoon administration has been attempting since 2023. Workers’ compensation insurance is a system created by public power to control and maintain capitalism that exploits workers ruthlessly until their bodies and minds are destroyed unless there are external restrictions. In some ways, it is a cheap system from the perspective of capital, as it compensates for already damaged bodies and minds while leaving the production speed and method intact that hurts workers, damages their muscles, and makes them mentally ill. However, the Yoon administration tried to neutralize even this minimal guarantee system.
The government even stepped forward and heavily promoted the false frame of ‘fake patients.’ The government unfairly lumped together a small number of ‘fake patients’ with the much larger number of sick and injured workers who were suffering from insufficient wages and days off work for treatment. They even said they would eradicate the ‘workers’ compensation cartel’ that did not exist. By giving up even the minimum role of public power to maintain capitalism, they reached a point where one has to question whether this country is truly a liberal democracy.
The same goes for attempts to revise working hours. Limiting working hours is also a minimum agreement between classes that has been made since the early days of capitalism. When there were no daily working hour limits, there were fierce struggles by workers who worked 14 – 16 hours a day, and it originated from the capitalist class’s recognition of the reality that the reproduction of the capitalist system itself could not be guaranteed in this way. This agreement has been regarded as the minimum bulwark that allows members of society to live humane lives and thus become equal participants in a democratic society. However, Yoon’s government has attempted to violate even this minimum social agreement.
As a candidate in 2021, Yoon Seok-yeol said, “Let’s make people work 120 hours a week.” He announced a “working hour system reform plan” in 2023 which was an attempt to nullify the 52-hour workweek cap. He withdrew it only after receiving nationwide criticism, including from trade unions outside of the two major trade unions containing millennials and Generation Z members that he thought were on his side. However, Yoon continued to try to avoid applying the 52-hour workweek cap to certain industries and certain jobs during certain periods. In fact, the 52-hour workweek itself still falls short of the social consensus of 150 years ago, which was 40 hours a week and 8 hours a day.
Why it is a matter of democracy
The health-related policies for migrant workers have also been regressing. It has been more than four years since a Cambodian worker died in a vinyl greenhouse in minus 20-degree weather in December 2020. Since then, the government decided not to issue new employment permits for temporary buildings such as containers and prefabricated panels inside vinyl greenhouses as accommodations, but if a ‘temporary building construction report certificate’ has been obtained, the use of accommodations is permitted. Because of this loophole in the system, many rural migrant workers are still living in vinyl greenhouses and temporary buildings. According to Rev. Dal-sung Kim, the head of the Pocheon Migrant Workers Center, illegal dormitories using old shipping containers are rampant. These “dormitories” have no heating system and no hot water, and bathrooms and kitchens are all outside. It is estimated that there are 1,500 such dormitories in agricultural and fishery workplaces in Gyeonggi Province alone, and even more in manufacturing workplaces.
In addition, instead of providing stable jobs to migrant workers, the government pursued a policy of continuously increasing the number of seasonal workers. Consequently, human rights violations such as wage exploitation increased. Without making efforts to limit multi-level subcontracting structures in shipyards, the government implemented a visa policy that brought in a large number of migrant workers. As a result, migrant workers were pushed into more dangerous situations, and the conflict between precarious native workers in South Korea and migrant workers only deepened.
Democracy cannot be limited to a power structure such as the presidential system, or the current election or political party system. There is no democracy in a society where people still die of occupational illnesses or in industrial accidents due to the failure to take simple safety measures, and where the rich can avoid preventing such dangers and punishment with the help of large law firms. When people are forced to live in outrageous residential and work environments because they are immigrants, precarious workers, or have low incomes, this is not a democratic society where we live ‘together.’ We cannot be equal political actors when we cannot secure the time and conditions to not just survive as workers, but to take care of ourselves and actively enjoy various relationships.
The labor policy of the Yoon administration has itself eroded the foundation of democracy over the past three years. The reasons for Yoon’s dismissal go beyond the fact that the declaration of martial law violated the legal order. Removing Yoon Seok-yeol in the name of workers who have died during that time goes beyond Yoon to also remove the vested interests that have left workers injured, sickened, and dead.
Beyond Yoon Seok-yeol and vested interests in politics
The declaration, “In the name of workers’ health, we dismiss Yoon Seok-yeol,” is a proposal to go beyond Yoon and the vested interests in politics that made him possible. The Democratic Party and the People Power Party appear to be at odds with each other in ‘politics’ such as prosecution reform, establishment of the Corruption Investigation Office for High-ranking Officials, and electoral system reform. However, they are not different in terms of pro-corporate economic policies that have undermined the foundations of South Korean social democracy. The Democratic Party, which has focused its efforts on the struggle to oust the regime since martial law, and the People Power Party, which has moved to the far right and defended Yoon Seok-yeol, have a clear difference in their attitudes toward the constitutional system. However, if you look at the contents of the ‘public welfare’ bill that the ruling and opposition parties passed through an agreement in December 2024, you can clearly see where their interests overlap.
The “Special Act on Promotion of Transformation of the Future Automobile Parts Industry and Cultivation of its Ecosystem” to systematically foster and support industries such as future automobiles and autonomous ships, the enactment of the “Basic Act on Support for Supply Chain Stabilization for Economic Security” to effectively prevent and respond to supply chain risks from the perspective of economic security, and the deletion of the validity period of the “Special Act on Enhancing Corporate Vitality” to convert it into a permanent law are all bills blatantly aimed at subsidizing specific companies. The same goes for the “Semiconductor Special Act,” which the ruling and opposition parties are competitively proposing and pushing for enactment in February. Jae-myung Lee, the leader of the Democratic Party of South Korea, went even further and declared in a press conference on January 23rd, “Ideology and factions do not feed us,” and “Corporate growth and development is the development of the national economy.” In the era of corporate leadership and government support, and the era of advanced and revitalized stock markets and the creation of new growth engines, as Jae-myung Lee has stated, there is a high possibility that the democracy of working people will still be trampled.
An ‘economic’ policy that ignores the lives of the working class people, and citizens, who are the main subjects of a democratic society, and concentrates power and wealth only in certain groups is bringing about a crisis in the ‘politics’ of democracy. It is said that a far-right youth who is in custody after invading the Western District Court said, “In South Korea, something called democracy is threatening the republic.” There is some truth in this if we view republicanism as a system that emphasizes the public interest and well-being of the community in order to guarantee the interests and rights of all. The fact is that the current vested interest two-party system, which recognizes the power and rights of the people only during election times in the name of democracy, in reality has been ignoring our interests and well-being, and that this is the very foundation on which far-right politics can grow in South Korea today.
Therefore, the call to dismiss Yoon Seok-yeol in the name of workers’ health is not just a proposal to change the government, but also a proposal to “transition from a system that has threatened workers’ health,” which is an urgent task for democracy at this time. One civil liberties activitist said that she hoped that public gatherings would continue even after Yoon’s removal, “until everyone is free from violence, discrimination, and is equal.” The bankruptcy of democracy, which we already sensed before martial law, should be overcome by those who have dreamed of an equal society without discrimination.
[1] Fraser is the Henry and Louise A. Loeb Professor of Philosophy and Politics at the New School for Social Research in the US.
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